Sunday, August 02, 2015, 1:29 p.m.

'Multimillion-dollar' rice mill planned for Pine Bluff port

Construction will begin immediately on a new rice mill at the Port of Pine Bluff, a "multimillion dollar" project that will initially create 25 jobs, officials said Monday.

Southwind Milling said in a statement the new mill at 4215 Emmett Sanders Road in the Pine Bluff Port's Harbor and Industrial District should open by February of next year with the first wave of new jobs.

The company then plans to expand "in the near future," the statement said, to double the capacity of the mill and add a rice flourmill. It wasn't immediately known how many jobs would be added then or when that expansion would occur.

The statement noted that the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and the Arkansas Development Finance Authority financed part of the project. A message left with a commission spokesman seeking details on that financing wasn't immediately returned, and no one answered early Monday afternoon at a number for the Optimum Group, which owns Southwind Milling.

The total cost of the project was described in the release only as a multimillion-dollar investment.